monarch butterfly

Insect ecologist Chip Taylor is a friend to both the monarch butterfly and the honeybee. He's been tracking monarchs and restoring their habitats since 1992. And he's worked with bees in French Guiana, Venezuela and Mexico.

The click of a hair curler and a spritz of hairspray punctuated conversation in the small side room of Monarch Watch, a conservation project based at the University of Kansas. Normally home to a display of tarantulas, the room on Friday was transformed into a dressing room for New York-based dancer Gwynedd Vetter-Drusch, who wore a black unitard decorated with sequins. In one corner of the room were the vividly-colored orange and black silk butterfly wings that would complete her metamorphosis.